This work presents the hardware demonstrator of a secure encryption system based on synchronised Chua chaotic circuits. In particular, the presented encryption system comprises two Chua circuits that are synchronised using a dedicated bidirectional synchronisation line. One of them forms part of the transmitter, while the other of the receiver. Both circuits are tuned to operate in a chaotic mode. The output (chaotic) signal of the first circuit (transmitter) is digitised and then combined with the message to be encrypted, through an XOR gate. The second Chua circuit (receiver) is used for the decryption; the output chaotic signal of this circuit is similarly digitised and combined with the encrypted message to retrieve the original message. Our hardware demonstrator proves that this method can be used in order to provide extremely lightweight real-world, chaos-based cryptographic solutions. This work was accepted for and presented as a hardware demo at the 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST 2022), held from 27 to 30 June 2022, in Washington, DC, USA.

In this work, we very briefly explore the use of neuromorphic and in-memory computing modules based on memristive circuits in the framework of predictive maintenance and supply chain management and security.

In this work, we explore a highly robust and unique Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) based on the stochastic assembly of single-walled Carbon NanoTubes (CNTs) integrated within a wafer-level technology. Our work demonstrates that the proposed CNT-based PUFs are exceptionally robust with an average fractional intra-device Hamming distance of 0.01 not only at room temperature, but also under temperatures in the range from 23 degrees Celsius to 120 degrees Celsius. As the number of unstable bits in the examined implementation is extremely low, our devices allow a lightweight and simple error correction, just by a selection of stable cells, thereby diminishing the need for complex error correction. Through a significant number of tests, we demonstrate the capability of novel nanomaterial devices to serve as highly efficient hardware security primitives.

In this work, we examine the potential of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) that have been implemented on NAND Flash memories using programming disturbances to act as sustainable primitives for the purposes of lightweight cryptography. In particular, we investigate the ability of such PUFs to tolerate temperature and voltage variations, and examine the current shortcomings of existing NAND-Flash-memory PUFs that are based on programming disturbances as well as how these could potentially be addressed in order to provide more robust and more sustainable security solutions. This work was accepted for and presented at the Workshop on Sustainability in Security, Security for Sustainability, which took place on 18 March 2022 and was co-located with the 25th Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE 2022).